And Now We Will Talk About My Bloody Valentine and The Internet

This weekend, a day before Beyonce’s instantly iconic halftime performance took millions of American boys by the hand and ushered them gently into puberty, there was another most important music event in the history of time. Big weekend! On Saturday afternoon, with Friday’s teasing from The L Magazine likely being Kevin Shields’ final straw, My Bloody Valentine released the follow-up to 1991’s Loveless at long last, with a nine-track album simply titled mbv posted for sale on the band’s official website. The excitement around this long-imagined thing finally unleashed was so great that the servers for the band’s website crashed immediately, providing one last, glorious meta-disaster on the road to headphoned euphoria. And while that snag was so perfect a twist that it almost had to happen, people (people of all demographic groups, probably, who just happened to be too old to be out on a Saturday night and unusually invested in alternative guitar rock) freaked the fuck out on Twitter.

The ten funniest and most original tweets!

the name of the new MBV album is 403 access denied— Gints V (@vanss_g) February 3, 2013

Where else can you go to find out what it would sound like if your sub-culture were included in a Jay Leno monologue? Twitter can be terrible.

Anyway, they fixed it and you could buy it, and everyone did. The band also put all of the album’s songs up to stream on YouTube, beating hordes of anonymous posters to the punch. After a few listens to the record, my favorite song might be “in another way.” It’s less wispy and gentle than the album’s first tracks, but still plenty melodic. It successfully works dance-tempo rhythms into the mix in a pleasing way. Listen to it below:

So, after 22 years of waiting, we’ve all come to a definitive verdict on this thing and its place in the MBV legacy in 2 days, right? No. Let’s not do that. It’s tough enough to distance ourselves from decades of longing, thinking about what would come after Loveless. That very dilemma almost ruined Kevin Shields’ mind more than once. We’re going to take a little more time to figure out how we feel about it, to try to find a way to be objective without all the baggage, and suggest that you do the same.

2 Comment

Artist keeps totally silent for 20 years. All of a sudden says, check it yo, gots me a web presence now (hashtag) and here’s our new thing with no preview that you know nothing about–16 bucks (for an MP3!) please. I give it a resounding ‘meh.’ Kinda egotistical, kinda shameless legacy baiting. Makes me think the release was engineered by an SEO manager circa internet 1.0 and put on hold in the interest of round numbers and pageviews.